HARBINGER

It's deja Vu all over again! as one footie commentator famously once said. It wasn't so long ago that Russia,Turkey and Iran had arrived at a realpolitik  accommodation over the Syria imbroglio. A workable  modus vivendi that isolated the US and its militarily rapacious NATO satrapies from inflicting further chaos and carnage on an already near-cataclysmically volatile area. It remains a matter of fact in international law that the Assad government ensconsed in Damascus is the internationally recognised legitimate government of Syria.The forces of Russia and Iran and its clients are assisting Assad to restore its territorial integrity and sovereignty. All other countries and their armed forces (covert and otherwise ) on Syrian territory are in gross violation of all precepts norms and rules of International Law.They are de facto committing war crimes. That's the US and all its NATO allies even including Erdogan's Turkey who are on their own idiosyncratic mission ...

Sudetenland 2.0 Turkish President Erdogan has given the rest of the international community notice of his intention to order a full scale military incursion into North-eastern Syria in order to establish a buffer-zone contiguous with the Turkish border. US forces currently in that area are due to vacate it leaving their erstwhile SDF /Kurdish allies on their own to face the imminent Turkish invasion. Military invasions of countries with which the invaders are not at war is in breach of international law.Not that International Law counts for very much in the current derangement paradigm in which the world finds itself. The very presence of US,UK,French,German,Australian ,Canadian and Turkish forces inside Syria is itself in breach of all diplomatic conventions, rules and international laws. The much referenced Westphalian system whereby nations respect each others sovereignty and territorial integrity has long been a convenient diplomatic fiction for almost as long as The Treat...

As the major Western powers continue their slide into irrelevance and become increasingly mired in the imbroglios of their own metropolitan ruling elites'making; bigger problems and more pressing issues of international import continue to spiral out of control even as the main western actors distance themselves from the realms of global, diplomatic Realpolitik. The Trump administration's largely contrived trade contretemps with the PRC and the UK's almost sublimely surreal implementation / revocation of the EURef2016 decision to Leave the EU still hold centre-stage. And meanwhile Syria and its peoples burn. This update on the atavistic urges of Turkish President Erdogan's drive to re-invent an ottoman empire,gleaned from SMM Syria  : "  As Turkey and the United States achieved an agreement on the fate of Northern Syria, the legal government of Syrian Arab Republic has strongly condemned it claiming that this achievement constitutes a flagrant aggression again...

The metropolitan globalist elites' hijacking and consequent betrayal of the Vote to Leave the EU on June 23 2016 aka " Brexit " ,has obliterated just about every other issue from serious consideration in public political discourse here in Britain since 2016. Equally, the Trump administration's obsession with perceived imbalances and disadvantages in US trade relations vis a vis primarily China and continued paranoia - fuelled  Democrat accusations against Russia have likewise obscured and marginalised other pressing political and diplomatic issues within the wider political discourse. Syria is still the intractable quagmire it was even before the US and its compliant EUNATO satrapies let their collective attentions wander to more seemingly urgent domestic political concerns.At least it has curbed,much against their liberal/interventionist instincts, the appetite to go around bombing the crap out of anywhere that gives their respective domiciled globalist elites co...

The trouble with triumphalism and its all too venal empty rhetoric is that rebuttals are swift and merciless,leaving the orator looking dumber than they were before. ISIS/Daesh has been virtually eviscerated from the maps of Syria and Iraq.Its fighters and their baggage trains of women and children being herded into SDF/Kurdish holding camps or being shunted safely to less hostile environments via humanitarian corridors is how the world at large now sees ISIS/Daesh. In the corporate MSM freakshow that's currently espousing the fate of one irrelevant individual ,Shamina Begum,every supine kowtowing Islamist shill and metropolitan multiculturalist apologist is buzzing like bluebottles around decaying meat,There are now a thousand and one " human interest" stories of westerners who traipsed off to volunteer for The Caliphate and now,of course,like the Germans in May 1945 express their regret at having chosen their sides so badly. Please let "us" not be nasty or ...

Usually I post a blog every 3 to 4 days throughout the month. In a typical year I make about 100 annual posts. December just ended was a pretty low aggregated total; why? because there was naff all to post anything new about. Syria  - The Balkan Wars I & II for our Age continues to sink ever deeper into an already unfathomable sociopolitical /  geopolitical strategic imbroglio,even with Trump's announcement of a US withdrawal and Erdogan -led Turkey's continuing ceaseless impatient pawing of the ground like some slavering,psychotic dog of war raring to get at the Kurds. In calmer climes, Brexit or rather what's left of it, is being slowly slowly shoved into a coffin that obviously is just a little too tight for comfort but nevertheless the metropolitan domiciled elites are wearying ever so slightly of their ludicrous pretend-antagonisms over a matter they all agree should never have been put before the People in a binding plebiscite in the first place. Whether t...

A few days ago, POTUS Trump announced the withdrawal of the US forces ( The figure quoted was 2,000 personnel) currently illegally stationed in Syria. This caused immediate consternation and hyperbolic over reaction from the Washington Beltway NeoCon establishment and their symbiotic liberal foreign interventionist partners aka the Democrats. DefSec Mattis resigned in the wake of the Commander-in-Chief’s welcome and somewhat unduly delayed strategic decision. The western -backed ( funded,trained,equipped and armed ) disparate terrorist gangs ranging from AlQaeda to ISIS/Daesh have proven several veritable hornets’ nests too much for the meddling US and its equally delusional and inept NATO satrapies to deal with let alone forge any worthwhile conclusion from. The Syria domiciled Kurds are the patsy in the middle getting lined up for another historically royal shafting from their supposed foreign friends and allies.Composing the bulk of the SDF fighting forces,the Kurdish fighter...

Very occasionally another commentator hidden among the swamps and jungle of the MSM and on-line media will put together a succinct exposition of a complex and pressing issue. Which is great for me as I then don't have to spend any time whatsoever re-inventing the wheel. Whilst the two major UK indigenous tribal parties continue their brutal exchanges of epithets and hyperbole which threatens to boil over into possibly something being done about it at some point in the not too distant future if at all; Syria remains the escalator of serious big power rivalry that is inexorably moving toward the end game and a resolution one way or the other. And neither of them offers hope to a world watching helplessly on from the sidelines. The city and province of Idlib is said to be the final redoubt of anything in the order of 10,000 head-chopping islamic terrorists ( ISIS/Daesh,Al Qaeda and all the theological factions in between .) The governments of Russia and Turkey with Ira...

Erdogan,that erstwhile ravening Turkish warmonger looks as though he's about to hit the existential jackpot in Syria. From funding,harbouring and arming ISIS/Daesh as well as Al Qaeda affiliates, and his subsequent de-facto annexation of sovereign Syrian territory through to building walls,watchtowers and entire military supply bases and depots inside Syria and deploying a commensurate invading Army,Erdogan has doubled down like the chronic high risk gambler and demagogic chancer that he is. And its all begun dropping apart in spectacular fashion.All his so-called NATO friends are deserting him and his allies have set a trap underneath him. The Turkish military haven't somehow heroically liberated their ethnic kinfolk from the clutches,as they see it,of Assad,but have been sucked ever deeper into a bottomless quagmire with no prospect of withdrawal. Credit in fair measure,for helping to bring out these dramatic changes in the circumstances on the ground in Syria must go t...

On Sunday June 24,Turkey goes to the polls. It is very likely that the incumbent President Erdogan will be returned to office.In the event that he is,the Turkish state will undergo a radical transformation and the office of president will assume vastly enhanced powers to the detriment of both the Turkish parliament and judiciary as presently constituted. The Turkish armed forces are currently illegally inside Syrian territory and are conducting military operations against indigenous mainly Kurdish militias as well as occupying Syrian villages,towns and cities; most notably Afrin, Idlib and Manbij. The US also has its armed forces illegally inside Syria and is conducting military operations and occupying Syrian territory.They have gone so far as to divide up mutually conquered Syrian territory with their Turkish co-aggressors. Which in purely International Law terms is utterly outrageous and without precedent.Not that the two NATO partner states have even bothered with the flimsie...

For the record it should be stated that:- Robert Fisk is an English writer and journalist. He has been Middle East correspondent intermittently since 1976 for various media; since 1989 he has been correspondent for The Independent. He is  widely respected ,hence his report a couple of days ago of his visit to Douma-where a chemical weapons attack against civilians was allegedly perpetrated-has caused such widespread alarm and despondency across  the Corporate MSM and social media platforms. This is not what,for instance, the 630 itinerant Westminster benchwarmers were expecting to be so graphically revealed to them in the wake of their pathetic,mewling faux-debate - post fact of the UK's involvement in the incident of international lawbreaking ( i.e. criminality ) where the US ,UK and France launched a massive air and missile attack against various  government establishments inside Syria.These establishments having been " identified " as critical infrastructure in the ...